The Children of Henry VIII (23 page)

Edward, meanwhile, convinced himself (or was convinced by others) that his half-sisters should be excluded from the succession. Both women had been declared illegitimate by his father’s Parliaments, something he believed took precedence over his
father’s will.
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And where religion was concerned, he came to think that not even Elizabeth could be trusted with his new Protestant settlement.

At the outset, Edward was as determined as his father not to be succeeded by a woman. When he first began to follow in his father’s footsteps and jot down his ideas for his own succession settlement in early April, his illness was briefly in remission. He still envisaged that, before his death, Lady Frances Brandon, whose husband Henry Grey had been created Duke of Suffolk in 1551 and whose children were the first residuary legatees to the throne by the terms of Henry VIII’s will, might have a son or that her eldest daughter, Lady Jane Grey, would marry and give birth to a son.

Since, however, Frances would shortly be approaching the menopause, it was more likely that Jane would marry and that her son (in Edward’s eyes) would be the rightful successor. To this end, Northumberland married his 19-year-old son Guildford to the 16-year-old Jane on 25 May, while on the same day her younger sister Katherine, who was just old enough to be legally wed, married Henry Herbert, son of the duke’s ally, the Earl of Pembroke.

Jane’s marriage greatly strengthened Northumberland’s hold on the dynasty, because Edward had the highest regard for Guildford, intriguingly describing him some time after the wedding to the councillors standing around his sickbed as ‘one of the sons of our guardian, the duke of Northumberland, and a man, unless I am mistaken, born to achieve celebrity; from him you may expect great things.’
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By the end of May, Edward knew he was dying. As his physicians reported, he had ‘a harsh, continuous cough, his body is dry and burning, his belly is swollen, he has a slow fever upon him that never leaves him.’ His sputum was ‘livid, black, fetid and full of carbon; it smells beyond measure. … His feet are swollen all over.’
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F
IGURE
13
‘My devise for the succession’: the original draft, also incorporating its first revision, of Edward VI’s proposed resettlement of the crown, which he altered to allow the direct succession of Lady Jane Grey.

With insufficient time to summon Parliament, Edward altered his earlier jottings. At first, he had ‘devised’ the crown ‘To the L[ady] Fraunceses heires masles’ and then ‘For lakke of such issu to the L[ady] Jane’s heires masles’. Now, he left it ‘To the L[ady] Fraunceses heires masles,
if she have any such issu befor my death
’ and then ‘
To the L[ady] Jane and
her heires masles’, followed—this in a subsequent revision (not illustrated)—by Jane’s sisters, Katherine and Mary, and their heirs male, and finally by the eldest son of their cousin, Margaret Clifford, daughter of Lady Eleanor Brandon by her marriage to Henry Clifford Earl of Cumberland, if all three Grey sisters died without heirs.
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How far the young king was Northumberland’s puppet in making his ‘Device for the Succession’ (as it is known) is hotly contested, but the original draft and its first revision are in Edward’s own handwriting throughout (see
Figure 13
).
⁷¹

On 24 June, the bulletin from the sickroom was that Edward ‘has not the strength to stir and can hardly breathe. His body no longer performs its functions, his nails and hair are dropping off, and all his person is scabby.’
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He died on 6 July, by which time letters patent confirming his ‘Device’ had been signed by Cranmer, the Privy Council, the judges, the Lord Mayor and aldermen of London, and as many other notables as could be convened in a hurry.
⁷³

Before allowing news of Edward’s death to leak, Northumberland sent his allies to take control of the Tower and the royal treasury and to swear the head officers of the royal household and the guard to an oath of loyalty to Queen Jane.
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On the 10th, Jane was proclaimed queen amid rumours that Edward had been poisoned.
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When told she had been chosen, she wept, but prayed to God for ‘such grace as to enable me to govern this kingdom with his approbation and to his glory.’
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A confident and assertive young woman whom Roger Ascham in a moment of indiscretion had hinted was a better scholar than Elizabeth, she saw herself as called by God to lead the Protestant cause.
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In his will, Edward insisted that his executors should ‘not suffer any piece of religion to be altered.’
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He would have known that he could trust Jane and Guildford on that score.

Northumberland, however, had allowed Mary to escape. On 3 July, while riding to visit Edward at Greenwich, she was secretly informed of his lapse into unconsciousness and of Northumberland’s plans to capture her.
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Considering herself to be the rightful heir under her father’s will, she fled to the heartland of her estates in Norfolk. On the 9th she began mobilizing her forces, which she mustered at one of her fortified houses, Framlingham Castle in Suffolk. Northumberland was sent with an army to defeat her, but when a naval squadron off the Norfolk coast defected and handed over its artillery to her, his troops melted away.

As late as the 18th, Jane was still sending out letters signed ‘Jane the Quene’ to sheriffs and magistrates, insisting that her rule was founded on ‘consent’ to Edward’s ‘Device’ and that she was queen ‘through God’s providence to the preservation of our common weal and policy’. It was she alone, not Mary, as one of these letters claimed, who could preserve the English crown ‘in the whole undefiled English blood.’
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Chaos, however, ruled in the localities. In Northampton, Jane and Mary were both proclaimed queen, causing a ‘great stir’ in the shire. In Sussex, Jane was rejected as ‘a queen of a new and pretty
invention’. Northumberland found it difficult to win and hold gentry support and soon many of the southern counties were declaring themselves for Mary.
⁸¹

Between 5 p.m. and 6 p.m. on the evening of 19 July after the Privy Council split into two rival camps, Mary was proclaimed queen in London. Northumberland and his allies were sent to the Tower. Jane, stripped of the crown jewels and her canopy of state, was led from the royal apartments and put under house arrest at the home of William Partridge, an officer in the royal ordnance within the Tower.

To celebrate,
Te Deum
was sung at St Paul’s, bells were rung and bonfires lit.
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Ten days later, Elizabeth entered the city with a heavily armed retinue dressed in the Tudor livery colours of white and green.
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Mary herself arrived on 3 August, riding side-saddle on her palfrey and wearing a magnificent French gown of purple velvet that was thick with gemstones, and entering the city to the sounds of trumpets and cheering crowds. Elizabeth had ridden out to Whitechapel to greet her and rode immediately behind her through streets swathed with streamers and banners of welcome.
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Northumberland was tried for treason on 18 August and executed at Tower Hill on the 22nd. Jane and her husband Guildford were tried on 13 November. Both pleaded guilty, and Jane, who stood before her judges wearing a plain black gown trimmed with black velvet and reading from a prayer book, was sentenced to be burned at the stake or decapitated.
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Mary was determined to have her revenge on Northumberland, but was inclined to pity Jane, whose mother Frances had always been close to her. It was perhaps Frances who told Mary of Jane’s belief that Northumberland had been the source of all her troubles. ‘He hath brought me and
our stock in most miserable calamity and misery by his exceeding ambition’, she was supposed to have said.
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Mary’s thoughts of clemency were swept aside by Sir Thomas Wyatt’s rebellion in January 1554. An evangelical reformer whose forces reached Fleet Street in London before they were defeated, Wyatt aimed to overthrow Mary and replace her with Elizabeth.

On 12 February 1554, Jane and Guildford were executed. With Mary safe on the throne, Elizabeth may have thought that her gestures of support for her half-sister on the eve of her accession might be suitably rewarded.

But if so, she was sadly deceived.

A
LTHOUGH
only 37 when proclaimed queen, Mary had not worn well. ‘Of low stature, with a red and white complexion and very thin’, as the Venetian ambassador unflatteringly described her, ‘her face is round, with a nose rather low and wide.’ Wrinkles were forming on her cheeks. Her eyes were large, her gaze piercing, her voice ‘rough and loud, almost like a man’s, so that when she speaks she is always heard a long way off.’
¹

Regularly ill, her symptoms still included the amenorrhoea, neuralgia and insomnia that had begun when she was 20, to which she had added ‘melancholy’, heart palpitations, poor appetite, chronic indigestion and increasingly poor vision.
²
As England’s first queen regnant, the pressure was on her from the outset and she had never coped well with stress. Once the euphoria of her entry into London was over, her advisers—a mixture of her household retainers, co-religionists and those privy councillors not closely associated with Northumberland or Jane Grey—attempted
to push through an unprecedented measure to have her claim to the throne confirmed by Parliament before she was crowned.
³

Neither the
Royal Book
nor the
Liber Regalis
(the fourteenth-century coronation service book used for all Tudor coronations) made provision for the accession of a woman ruler. Accordingly the Privy Council tried to insist that Edward’s ‘Device’ and last will should first be declared null and void and Henry VIII’s will valid before Mary could legitimately be crowned. A further concern was that the default position after her father’s break with Rome was that she would become Supreme Head of the Church, whether she liked it or not. Some councillors feared a legal muddle, others an assassination attempt if her status was not first clarified.

The new queen brushed all these objections aside. Her coronation by the bishop of Winchester went ahead at Westminster Abbey on Sunday, 1 October, bypassing Edward’s religious settlement by including a full Roman mass.
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Mary vetted the order of service to ensure that her coronation oath did not mention the new religion. And where Edward’s oath had included a promise to observe ‘the laws and liberties of this realm’, she altered the wording so as to promise to keep ‘the
just and licit
laws and liberties’. Anxious, lastly, that the chrism Cranmer had used to anoint her half-brother in 1547 was tainted by schism, Mary arranged for three phials of freshly consecrated unction to be imported from France. The only mishap came at the end of the coronation ceremony, when she was handed two sceptres, ‘the one of the king, the other bearing a dove which, by custom, is given to the queen’, a curiously contradictory expression of the status of a queen regnant.
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